Khoton (originally of Turkic origin) in Tarialan, Uvs. The Khoton were deported by the Zunghars from Central Asian cities to Western Mongolia, lost their original Turkic language and speak a Dörböd dialect of Oirat.[13][14]

Oirat is endangered in all areas where it is spoken. In Russia, the killing of a large fraction of the Kalmyk population and the destruction of their society as consequences of the Kalmyk deportations of 1943, along with the subsequent imposition among them of Russian as the sole official language have rendered the language obsolescent: it is almost exclusively the elderly that have a fluent command of Kalmyk.[18] In China, while Oirat is still quite widely used in its traditional ranges and there are many monolingual speakers,[19] a combination of government policies and social realities has created an environment deleterious to the use of this language: the Chinese authorities' adoption of Southern Mongolian as the normative Mongolian language,[20] new educational policies which have led to the virtual elimination of Mongolian schools in Xinjiang (there were just two left as of 2009), policies aiming to curtail nomadism, and the limited occupational prospects in Chinese society for graduates of Mongolian schools.[21] As for Mongolia, the predominance of Khalkha Mongolian is bringing about the Khalkhaization of all other varieties of Mongolian.[22]

Oirat has been written in two script systems: historically, the Clear script, which originated from the Mongolian script, was used. It uses modified letters shapes e.g. to differentiate between different rounded vowels, and it uses a small stroke on the right to indicate vowel length. It was retained longest in China where it can still be found in an occasional journal article. In Kalmykia, a Cyrillic-based script system has been implemented. It is strictly phonemic, not representing epenthetic vowels, and thus doesn’t show syllabification. In Mongolia, Central Mongolian minority varieties have no status, thus Oirats are supposed to use Mongolian Cyrillic which de facto only represents Khalkha Mongolian. In China, Buryat and Oirat are considered non-standard as compared to Southern Mongolian and are therefore supposed to use the Mongolian script and Southern Mongolian grammar (if not, as in current practice, rather Mandarin Chinese and Hanzi) for writing.

^Birtalan 2003. Note that she is not altogether clear about that matter as she writes: "For the present purpose, Spoken Oirat, from which Kalmuck is excluded, may therefore be treated as a more or less uniform language." (212). See also Sanžeev 1953